Price, Aimée Brown

English

Caltech Authors - Main

DIVISION OF THE HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES 
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY 
PASADENA, CALIFORNIA 91125 
THE ROMANTICS TO RODIN 
Aimee Brown Price 
HUMANITIES WORKING PAPER 49 
June 1980 
"THE ROMANTICS TO RODIN" 
Aimee Brown Price 
Sculpture abounded by the late nineteenth-century in France. 
Despite a formidable output in a time and place we fancy we know 
well, and indeed despite the excellence of much of the work, it remains 
largely unfamiliar. "The Romantics to Rodin: French Nineteenth-Century 
Sculpture from North American Collections,"* organized by Peter Fusco 
and H. W. Janson, brings together a rich sampling of this sculpture, 
(over two hundred works by fifty-eight artists) and should do much to 
reinstate it. Being confronted with this wonderful array of both 
monumental (in reduced versions) and more personal works produced over 
a goodly span of time, the viewer may perceive it, quite properly, in 
terms of general artistic production, a cultural phenomenon fulfilling 
societal needs and desires of diverse orders. 
"Statuomanie" -- a mania of sculpture -- was a term invented 
to describe the proliferation of large-scale work in public places. 
Sculpture often the visual foci in city plans, was the embodiment of 
sanctioned concepts and official goals that all might see. In countless 
gardens and smaller squares homage was done history's and society's great 
personages; the number alone of commemorative monuments seems a self-
congratulatory testimonial to cultural -- if it could not be to political 
continuity and the society's greatness. Sculpture was also enjoyed as 
a gracious visual and material embellishment -- the extent of exterior 
* In Los Angeles until May 25, then traveling to Minneapolis, Detroit, 
and Indianapolis. 
sculptural decoration was one way to tell a first class apartment 
building. Reduced versions of monumental works were frequently 
available for private acquisition as was a great deal of other 
2 
sculpture, often produced in extended editions in a choice of size, 
material, and finish. Sculpture, contrived to appeal and to sell, 
to thrill, to reassure, and to be understood, often bore spare 
meanings, literate but not intellectually freighted, as sharply 
delimited as the sculptural presences themselves frequently were. 
Sculpture pleased through sentiment, its expressive humanity, its 
sensuality, directly through the physical materials used, and its 
workmanship. Meaning was usually bound up with the physical object which 
was often illustrative of an idea -- in this respect it was an art far 
different from most of that of our own day and the renegade nineteenth-
century painting long studied. 
But we have emerged from old trenches and have come to consider 
the special intricacies of painting of the nineteenth-century themes 
and content, public, official and salon art and bourgeois taste -- and 
now we must consider these questions further and a good deal more, as we 
must put sculpture into the art hopper. 
For the past ten years French nineteenth-century sculpture 
increasingly has been studied (the authors of several doctoral dissertations 
are among the contributors to the present catalogue and mainly desist from 
unduly championing their artists), bought (a number of works in the 
exhibition are recent arrival to these shores), and displayed in excellent 
small (Ruth Butler's 1971 "Nineteenth Century French Sculpture: Monuments 
for the Middle Class") fascinating ("Metamorphoses in Nineteenth-Century 
Sculpture" at the Fogg, 1975), exhibitions. 
3 
A special strength of "The Romantics to Rodin," exhibition 
is the guidance provided to a better understanding of the variety of 
work via an installation marked by intelligence and wit (by Peter Fusco 
in Los Angeles), and a book-size catalogue that includes deft and excellent 
contributions by a number of the most knowledgeable scholars in this 
relatively unworked field. The catalogue enlarges on attendant issues 
and provides new axes of appreciation in a series of often spirited essays 
and will be of lasting value. Though some essays suffer somewhat from a 
lack of strong resolution because the themes laid out are simply too vast 
and complex, among the many contributors writing on what they know very 
well are Ruth Butler, June Hargrove, Gerald Ackerman. Most will know the 
exhibition through the catalogue; it is a pity there is no lasting record 
of the installation (a videotape pocketed with the catalogue?) from which 
one gains so much. 
The rich sampling of works displayed in Los Angeles in a large 
space replete with palms and pedestals suggesting nineteenth-century 
Salon exhibitions, was introduced by a reduced version of Bartholdi's 
colossus, Liberty Enlightening the World ("The Statue of Liberty,") 
emblematic of France's gift to North America. Works were arranged not 
according to one schema, though sculpture by a single artist tended to 
be together, but in carefully phrased groups that propose, as the French 
say, numerous aspects of interest and encourage a rich interplay of ideas 
both particularly important at this stage of discovery. Thus, even 
though individual works were not all of the first importance, they 
contributed to the development of contexts of understanding. 
Of prime importance, of course, is subject matter: portraits, 
4 
mythological, religious and allegorical works, each informed with 
peculiar nineteenth-century preoccupations and problems (how to make 
allegorical figures germane to present situations, for one) are 
presented. The many portraits, as an example, include busts, medallions, 
and small, full-length figures, historical figures and studies of exotic, 
ethnological types; and through the number alone we are led to contemplate 
the cultural need they satsfied. Moreover, certain figures are available 
in a number of versions for comparison: the newly popular Joan of Arc, 
delicate but armored, is represented by a number of finely fashioned 
examples. Rodin's Balzac (in a nude preliminary version, but already 
sporting a defiant air), was once rejected in favor of Falguiere's 
sophisticated white marble head with its bemused expression; both are here 
and some caricatures of Balzac besides. The exhibition is generous 
enough and open-ended enough to include unusual works -- one of three 
portraits of Sarah Bernhardt is her own bizarre self-characterization as 
an ostrich-feathered vampire-like sphinx in the form of an inkwell and 
curiosities -- Willeme's experimental wood photo-sculpture Bust of a 
Woman. 
Rude's howling head of La Marseillaise, Barye's combating 
animals, Carpeaux' grimacing Ugolino and excitable genius of La Danse, 
a Degas dancer and wheeling horse the best-known sculpture in the 
context of the general production gathered really may be seen anew. 
Important but less familiar sculptors are represented by a range of work 
and we may note their special strengths: Dalou's sweet and self-possessed, 
comfortable women, Carrier-Belleuse's worldly and gleaming sculptural 
furnishings, and the particularity of expression in Falguiere's stolid 
figures. A most important lesson, however, is how many projects, themes, 
5 
materials, sizes, and styles interested and were put to use by the 
professional nineteenth-century sculptor. Barye, for one, is 
represented, as we would expect, as the author of magnificent 
groups of fighting animals, but also a stately equestrian portrait, 
a fantastical abduction, and an elegantly archaizing Theseus poised 
a l'antique locked in embrace with the Minotaur, curious candalabra 
combining the grotesque and ideal, and an allegorical group. 
Style may have been eclectic, but not haphazard. The Rococo 
revival of the l860s and 70s influenced figure types ("le joli" or 
pretty) and mood (see Clesinger's Nymph and Satyr), and mannerism 
a la Fontainebleau seemed apt for architectural decoration. Barye's 
archaizing Theseus suggests the origins of the story, and as Ruth Butler 
points out, St. Theresa's ecstatic attitude is modeled on a style we know 
from sixteenth-century Spanish Baroque, an age of faith. Indeed, though 
works are grouped to encourage a multiplicity of contexts of understanding, 
large stylistic definitions and categorization by political periods are 
avoided. 
Through the thoughtful clustering of work we are brought to 
see lines of progression in the articulation of formal motifs: Falguiere's 
Hunting Nymph poised smilingly on one foot and Degas' the Grande Arabesque; 
Mercle's finely rendered Gloria Victis (Gustave Dore's Glory, illustrated 
in the catalogue), and Rodin's emphatic Call to Arms. Also by Dore 
(better known for his illustrations), is Acrobats (or Pyramide Humaine-
Saltimbanques), with figures scrambling for position in a way that bears 
comparison to figures on Rodin's Gates of Hell begun in the same years. 
One of the blessings, among many, conferred by the exhibition 
6 
is a better understanding of the generative currents around Rodin 
and his particular originality. His early Suzon, already activating 
surrounding space with her gaze, turned head, and half-opened mouth 
is shown alongside the politely contained Fantasy Bust after MIle 
Sophie Croizette by Carrier-Belleuse, his teacher. (The last, 
represented by eleven works, has his own triumphs in the exhibition.) 
Though human and animal encounters and abductions (by fauns, centaurs, 
bears, and gorillas)is a curiously prevalent motif, a comparison of 
Clesinger's charming, neo-rococo Bacchante and Faun, playfully dallying 
and Rodin's abandonment of stylistic niceties in his unabashedly demanding 
Faun and frightened Nymph in Minotaur [!] Faun and Nymph is particularly 
informative. The exaggerations and adumbrations of forms in Rude's 
work and the sculptured caricatures by Dantan and Daumier may have 
prepared the way for Degas and Rodin to take their own expressive 
liberties. Unlike most other sculptors who insisted on full physical 
fact, Rodin synthesized and suggested. In most other works the surface 
is kept at a high degree of tension; in Rodin's, an inner tension bursts 
forth. Rodin controlled viewpoint and even sharpness of focus; he 
encapsulated and omitted. His extraordinary .compositions with those of 
Preault (unfortunately his best works are not present) and Degas culminate 
an epoch in which we have seen bodies posed every which way. 
Although efforts were made to show several versions and 
stages of development of sculpture -- a bronze sketch and a finished 
model of Carpeaux' Ugolino and His Sons, Falguiere's Diana and Head 
of Diana (like a zoom lens view), Carrier-Belleuse's Diana Victorious 
(in marble and terracotta) -- more closely related exemplars illustrating 
more subtle variations in workmanship, quality and appearance such as 
were brought together in the Fogg exhibition '~etamorphoses in 
Nineteenth-Century Sculpture" would have been instructive in terms 
7 
of connoisseurship and pertinent. Certain production practices are 
discussed in the catalogue, notably in conjunction with Barye, Carpeaux, 
and Rodin; but in view of the surprising number of versions routinely 
turned-out (farmed out for manufacture) with new editions of each 
variant reduced and blown up versions in several sizes, excerpted 
figures and motifs -- motivated often by commercial exploitation not 
aesthetic invention, a detailed discussion would have been of service. 
We are exposed to an astonishing diversity of sizes and scale 
table-top to life-size to reductions of colossi -- and a striking variety 
of materials. The reduced scale of many works raises questions about the 
effect of scale itself on meaning: violent animals become drawing 
room curiosities and sensual figures are literally reduced to sexual 
objects. Size underscores their role as objects, to be collected. But 
this is only one way the materiality of the sculpture is underscored. 
The sumptuousness and variety of materials and tended 
surfaces themselves charm and delight. Bronzes washed in silver, 
porcelain, terracotta, tinted ivory, marble, sundry patinas of bronzes, 
the tawny-veined jasper providing Cordier the stripes for his exotically 
costumed Negro -- all assert themselves with their own actuality and 
identity. In this company, the interest in and actuality of matiere 
itself in Degas' Little Dancer, Fourteen Years Old, with real gauze tutu 
and ribbon (and originally also a wig), does not seem so unusual. 
A compelling aspect of much of the work is its direct appeal 
even through pose, gaze, and composition, and a striving for immediacy 
and actuality that seems to increase towards the end of the century. 
8 
Complex compositions of multiple figures and elements often do not 
follow an a priori structure or, as noted, "time-honored" stances; 
in the interest of actuality figures tend to be lined up or, in the 
case of sensual figures ,are put on display. In other instances, whether 
Barrias' The First Funeral or Rodin's Burghers of Calais with strewn-out 
figures, there is a paratactic rhythm which relates to twentieth-century 
work; figures are self-involved and isolated psychologically and this is 
made manifest in their physical isolation, woe for the sacra conversazione. 
Sometimes placement also was considered: Rodin's life-size Eve was to be 
exhibited on ground level with its low base hidden in the sand; Preault's 
Ophelia drowning (not exhibited) and Degas' woman in The Tub were to 
be placed to be viewed from above. The willful actuality of many works 
tends to belie our cherished notion of a necessary psychic distance to 
objects we would view as art. Gerome's backward glancing life-like 
Ball Player merits comparison with Duane Hanson's super-real figures. 
One of the most touching aspects of the exhibition, since 
we have broken with that tradition, is the great store put in the 
human presence, pushed to extremes in exhaustive numbers of poses,to 
embody so much meaning -- actual, mythological, religious and allegorical. 
With so much riches it is ungrateful to find fault. But there 
are irritations: one is the propensity of some catalogue authors to 
second-guess the artist,suggesting how works might have been better or go 
too far rather than accepting them as given and explaining them as such. 
No essay really addresses itself to the works on hand. To begin to 
understand patterns of collecting French sculpture in North America, 
dates of arrival should have been included. Interpretations of eroticism 
9 
(open) run to the post-Freudian. 
On the other hand, all kinds of new and important questions 
are broached -- such as the aptness of certain subjects for painting 
or sculpture. We may look forward now to making some real comparisons 
between painting and sculpture including a discussion of the differences 
of audience. Most important, through the present exhibition a vast 
group of work may be more readily enjoyed. 


The romantics to Rodin

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The romantics to Rodin

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